


a deep but dazzling darkness

by Lirazel



Category: The Vast of Night (2019)
Genre: (kinda), Alien Abduction, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Building a Life, F/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Recovery, Trauma, and this is what my heart desired, it probably doesn't but the desires of the heart are vast and mysterious, why does a perfect film need fix-it fic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28753146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/pseuds/Lirazel
Summary: Three days later, Sloan and Crocker walked out of the desert: filthy, barefoot, half-naked, sunburnt, dehydrated, delirious. The baby was not with them.A way it might have been. Fay and Everett in the aftermath.
Relationships: Fay Crocker/Everett Sloan
Comments: 16
Kudos: 27





	a deep but dazzling darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly the film is perfect as is but the desires of the heart are vast and mysterious.

_...another intriguing report from that same area. In the fall of 1958, seventeen-year-old Everett Sloan, sixteen-year-old Fay Crocker, and Fay’s one-year-old sister Maddy disappeared from the desert town of Cayuga, New Mexico while most of the population of the small community was gathered in the high school gym attending the season’s first basketball game. Both Sloan and Crocker were seen by multiple persons before the game; by the time it was over, they and the toddler had vanished._

_That same night, mysterious lights in the sky appeared over the valley and canyon that dominate the landscape, and strange noises were picked up on commercial and ham radios throughout the area on both sides of the Mexican border. At the time, these two events were not connected by local authorities._

_Three days later, Sloan and Crocker walked out of the desert: filthy, barefoot, half-naked, sunburnt, dehydrated, delirious. The baby was not with them._

_It should be a classic example of an alien abduction. But these were the types of stories that didn’t get attention until after Barney and Betty Hill’s story caught the imagination of the nation in 1961. The missing persons story was reported in the _Cayuga Courier_ and a few nearby local newspapers, and there were notes in papers as far away as El Paso mentioning the lights. But even though there was no explanation for the disappearance and Maddy Crocker was never found, the story is rarely included in collections of abductee narratives because, it seems, no one outside of that southwestern corner of New Mexico ever heard about it. _

_I learned of the story only in 1966 or ‘67, at a time when I was still being contacted by many interested parties throughout the country. A fellow passenger on a train between DC and New York told me the story of the three kids who’d disappeared a few towns over from where he grew up. As you know, I prefer more vetting before I pursue a lead, but given where the man was from, I thought it worth pursuing. Being busy with other investigations, it was several months before I made it to New Mexico. When I did, I discovered that both Crocker and Sloan had left Cayuga several years before. Crocker’s mother had passed away, and Sloan’s parents had moved back east. It was impossible to track them down._

_But the memory of a small town is long, and I found much that was intriguing. A couple from nearby Culp Canyon who claimed to be the last people to see the three told me that on the radio that night, Sloan, who worked as a local DJ, had interviewed a caller claiming to have secret information about mysterious government projects in the desert. However, even though this would have been recorded on playback at the time, the local radio station had no such tapes (I can confirm this; I spent several dusty days in their archives). The couple said that the three children had been in the car with them, but, in fear, had fled from it and were not seen again until two of them walked out of the desert. (Just what they were running from remains unclear.) A tantalizing detail: the couple both agree that Sloan and Crocker had a tape recorder--”a big, bulky one”--with them when they ran off. Paperwork from the local sheriff’s office does record that a Magnecord PT-6 was found not far from where the three abductees disappeared, but after it was brought in as evidence, no one ever saw it again. I don’t need to tell you what I think happened to it._

_Because the feds were in Cayuga that day. A retired nurse who had worked with Crocker’s mother and treated both survivors in the hospital said that suited men who she assumed to be working for the government had appeared and interrogated both teenagers._

_I also interviewed the current sheriff who had been a deputy in ‘58, a man named Fred Boker. On the morning after the disappearance, the Air Force arrived at the site of the abduction only an hour after local law enforcement did, and they cordoned the area off and wouldn’t allow the sheriff back in. Stymied, the theory the sheriff’s office eventually settled on was that the baby had been attacked--whether by wild animals or a person, they never specified--and the teenagers were too traumatized to remember what happened._

_This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. By all accounts, Fay Crocker was protective of her sister, a responsible girl. And yet neither she nor Sloan had any defensive wounds. Their feet were scraped up from walking through the desert without shoes, but other than extensive sunburning and the results of dehydration, they were physically fine. Would she really have let man or beast steal her little sister right out of her arms without fighting back? In addition, the teenagers emerged from the desert near San Mirial, twenty miles away from where the couple from Culp Canyon said they had gotten out of the car._

_Remember, though, that this took place years before the Hills’ story made alien abduction part of the national conversation. At that time, local law enforcement completely lacked the context to understand alien abduction. I don’t blame them for essentially shrugging and saying, “We’ll never know.”_

_But I’m pretty sure someone knew. To my frustration, I have been unable to discover what the feds found out. My sources haven’t found anything on this case, though I believe that languishing away somewhere in a government archive are the details of how the Air Force covered up the Cayuga story..._

Excerpt from pages 62-64, _Vanished: Lesser Known Flying Saucer Encounters_ by Donald Keyhoe, 1976

\---

The first time Fay wakes up, she feels like her whole body is on fire, with the source of the firestorm in her throat. Even after the nurse gives her water, she can’t speak, and the cool darkness comes for her again before she can croak out Maddy’s name.

The second time she wakes up, there’s a man in a black suit standing at the foot of her bed. She can’t see his face as he bends over a small notebook; his hat is in the way and she doesn’t have her glasses on. Her skin feels too tight and still throbs with pain, but she’s able to call for Maddy this time. 

When the man looks up, she sees only the flash of light off of his horn-rimmed glasses. 

The man has a lot of questions. 

When they finally, _finally_ let her see Everett, he whispers, fierce and quiet into her ear, “Hey, you’re okay, you’re okay, kiddo. What did you tell them?”

“Nothing,” she hisses, fisting her hands into the fabric of his t-shirt, thinking of Billy, sick and alone and dying. They have no way of finding him, and even if they did, Fay wouldn’t, not after the past few hours in that small office with that blank-faced black-clad man. She'll never lead anyone to Billy. 

Everett smells like aloe vera and hospital and skin, and she wants to crawl inside of him and never come out again. 

“Maddy?” he asks, voice all choked up in a way she’s never heard from him, for all that she’s been listening to his voice for years and years.

She sobs for a long, long time, but he doesn’t let her go until her tears run out.

\---

The sunlight hurts her eyes. The doctor says that’s because her eyes were damaged by the glare off the desert, but that they should heal quickly; Ethel buys her pair of green cat-eye sunglasses with rhinestones. She can’t wear them and her glasses at the same time, but that’s all right. She doesn’t want to see Mom’s face anyway. Better for the world to be a slightly less bright blur of colors and movement, even after her eyes heal. 

All the same, she tries to be inside by the time night falls. When she can’t, she finds herself walking fast towards shelter, hunched over like there’s something in her arms she has to protect. 

She doesn’t look up. 

( _She never looks up._ )

\---

Her skin blisters and peels and it’s awful but it feels right: that after what she’s been through, her very skin should be replaced with something new. 

\---

“Was he there? My Hollis?” 

Fay has never heard hope so fragile, swollen to its shattering point. She can’t bring herself to meet Mrs. Blanche’s eyes. Everett had tried to talk Fay out of going to see her, told her that they don’t owe this woman anything, but she knows he feels ashamed, too, even if he won’t admit it. 

(“If we’d taken her….”

“We couldn’t have, Fay, you know that, goddamn you. We couldn’t have made it out there to the forest with her with us--we wouldn’t have been there at all. If we’d taken her, then nothing would have happened.”

“ _Exactly_. Nothing.”

But they didn’t take her, and now Maddy’s not here. Nothing would have been so, so much better.)

“I’m sorry,” she says, because she can’t say _Forgive me_. “I don’t remember.”

She doesn’t. She doesn’t remember anything from the in-between time. This is what she remembers: that weird, heady night, running and running through the ghost town streets of the only bit of the planet she’s ever known, that sound--on the phone line, on the radio, on Mr. Buck’s tape. The weight of Maddy in her arms and her sweet baby smell, the way that couple’s heads tilted back and back, the lights of the oncoming truck flashing and Fay being _so sure_ that Maddy was going to die right there in that car and it was all her fault, the smell of wildfire and desert dust.

The lights in the sky.

The wind, and Everett wrapping himself around her, Maddy warm and whimpering between them.

And then…waking up under a soaptree in the desert. 

Everett was with her. 

Maddy wasn’t.

Fay can’t bring herself to meet Mrs. Blanche’s eyes because she doesn’t want to see what her mom will look like in fifty years.

(Her mom never gets to look like that. Nine months later, Fay comes home from Everett’s house and finds Mom with her head in the oven.)

\---

Neither Everett nor Fay ever sets foot in Cayuga High School again. Fay’s teachers send her her assignments through Gretchen or Millie, and Fay falls on the mundane schoolwork, the orderly black and white lines of the textbooks, the press of pencil against paper like it’s salvation. She’s always been an excellent student, but now she’s nearly flawless. She earns her diploma a year early, but she doesn’t go to graduation, no matter how much her old friends beg. She thinks of them like that: her old friends, her friends from when she was a different person. She thinks she still loves them, in a distant, behind-glass way, but you can’t feel close to people who look at you like that: baffled and scared and even a little angry. Everyone in town looks at her that way. Everyone but Everett.

Everett doesn’t bother with school. His pale wisp of a mother begs and his stiff-shouldered father demands, but they can’t make him. Everett stays in his room with his ham radios and the books he sends away for. She’s the only one he lets in.

She always has to step around empty plates--his mother leaves his meals on a tray outside his door--and remove a stack of books or a new tape recorder from the chair to sit down, and his room always smells a little too much like cigarette smoke and teenage boy, but it’s better than being at Ethel’s. She’s grateful to Ethel for taking her in--she didn’t have any other options--but the _looks_ her cousin gives her: guilty, begging looks, asking for forgiveness. Fay can’t stand it, and so she spends as much time as she can either in the back corner of the library or at Everett’s.

“I can’t believe they let you buy all this,” she says, poking an unfamiliar-looking device. He probably already told her what it is. She has a hard time remembering things these days. But the Sloans have always been “comfortably off,” as Mama would say; not everybody watches every penny like Fay has since she was a child.

“Oh you know how moms fuss like a old wet hens. Mother thinks I’m going to kill myself. She’ll buy anything she thinks will keep me alive.” He remembers, too late, and he winces as he finally raises his head from the book he’s reading. “Hey, Fay--” he starts, his eyes already going apologetic behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“Why are you reading books about radio repair?” she cuts him off. “You don’t have to know how they work to be a DJ.” And the way things work was always more her thing than his.

He takes the change of conversation gracefully; Everett’s always been able to keep up with any conversation; it’s she that felt like she was lagging behind. “Geez, cat, you kidding? It makes you more hireable, dumbo. If you can say, ‘Not only do I have a voice to charm millions, but I can fix anything that breaks,’ they’ll be more likely to give you a chance at one of the buzzin’ stations. You know.”

She can’t believe he can bring himself to think about the future. If she thinks of anything before or after this exact moment, she feels like she’ll fall apart. She fastens her gaze on the blue striped curtains and says, “Why are you still here? The West Coast is where everything’s happening in radio.”

He tilts his head, drawing her eyes back, and says only, “Come on, Fay.”

She can’t believe he can bring himself to think of the future, but she’s so grateful he’s waiting for her. 

\---

She can’t go back to the switchboard, so she works at the library instead. The patrons only ask her questions she can actually answer, and the quiet is soothing. It’s not enough, not even when she has a place to stay and only herself to support, so she takes the bus to Hobbs and sells stamps at the post office. 

Between her schoolwork and her jobs, she’s really only got time for Everett. That’s what she tells herself, when she feels every relationship she ever had crumbling down to nothing. 

\---

Mrs. Blanche dies the next fall, and Fay doesn’t find out until the lawyer contacts her. 

“It’s really not that much,” she says, staring at the paperwork later in Everett’s room. “But it was everything she had.” She tears up again, crying for that sad old woman in a way she’s never been able to cry for her own mother.

“Fay,” he says, a little breathless, and when she looks up, there’s the closest thing she’s seen to the old light shining in his eyes. “You’ve gotta go to college. Fay, we’re gonna get out of this shithole.”

Once, the realization that she had enough money to do that would have lit her up inside like fireworks. Now, though, she only feels a kind of glass-smooth relief that she doesn’t have to decide on her own what to do next. 

\---

It was always going to be California. That’s where people like them always run off to. Everett talks about Los Angeles, and she knows that would probably be the best place for him to look for a job, but she just wants to get away from the desert. (She dreams of rain.) San Francisco State has a decent physics program, and with her grades, she even gets a scholarship. The pride she feels at her acceptance letter is the first vivid emotion she’s felt in months. 

\---

They get married because, honestly, it means less of a fuss. They aren’t in love, really, but nobody in a decent part of town will want to rent to a young couple without a marriage certificate (especially not when Fay barely looks her seventeen years). So they get one at the courthouse when they reach Santa Fe, and a couple of second-hand rings from a pawnshop.

“Are you sure?” he asks her in the bus on the way. “You might meet some nice young man at college.”

“Are you sure?” she shoots back. “You might meet some pretty young lady at a soda fountain.”

A snort. “Yeah, and tell her what?” he says, and that’s the end of that. Because she knows exactly what he means. Even if she did fall in love with some nice young man, he would never be able to understand her. She isn’t giving up anything, or even the possibility of anything, in marrying Everett.

It doesn’t change much. Everett lets her have the bed, and he sleeps on the sofa most nights. The nights when she doesn’t wake up screaming. Those nights, he climbs into bed with her and wraps himself around her and sings Dinah Shore songs to her (and Everett hates Dinah Shore, so it means even more).

He doesn’t have nightmares; he has insomnia instead. When she wakes in the night, she can hear the sound of that terrible jazz station he likes, playing softly on radio in the living room-kitchen of their tiny apartment above a Maltese widow’s house in Bayview. He brings home a bottle of something sharp-smelling one night, and she bites her tongue because she knows she nags him too much. But the next time she sees that paper bag in his hands, she begs him. She remembers what the men in her mother’s life were like, and she’ll die before she’ll see him turn into that. She knows how easy it would be for him to slide into one of those bottles and never come out again. 

“Please, Everett. Don't. _Please_. You’re all I have.”

He doesn’t bring home another one.

\---

It’s never dark in the city. Even at night, there are street lights and neon signs, traffic lights and headlights flashing through the dark.

When she can bring herself to glance up, she barely sees the stars. The sky feels lower here, more solid, like a ceiling instead of an endless abyss. It’s comforting.

(Years later, she’ll learn the term “light pollution” and though as a scientist she’s more than aware of its negative effects on humans and the environment, she never does _feel_ the danger of it. The only reason she doesn’t sleep with a nightlight is because every night as she falls asleep, she hears Everett moving around in the next room.)

\---

She likes her classes. They’re a challenge in a way Cayuga High School never was, and wrestling with a thorny problem is better than thinking her own thoughts. When she studies, during lectures, reading thick textbooks, she feels like she’s taken a step outside her own head for a while. The things she learns don’t light her up with excitement like they once would have, but there’s such a pleasure in being really good at something and making measurable progress. 

She feels more than a little bad, that she’s doing this when Everett’s still doing radio repair at a little shop a few trolley stops away. But he shrugs, shifts the cigarette around in his mouth, and says, “No sweat. It’s just for a minute--California will hear from the Maverick soon enough.”

She doesn’t feel close enough to him to push, to find out whether he really is that optimistic or whether he’s just saying it to keep from hurting her feelings. He’d told her once that he was always hurting some girl’s feelings, and he does still hurt hers, but he tries with her, and that counts for something. 

\---

The few girls in the physics department tease her about the ring on her finger. When they ask what her husband does, she doesn’t say, “He fixes radios,” she says, “He’s a DJ,” because he _is_ , even if he hasn’t been hired yet to do that here. Then Marcia says, “How did a nerd like you get a cool guy like that?”

She’s teasing. Fay remembers what it was like to tease other girls once. She herself didn’t get teased--she never got enough male attention for that--but sometimes she would tease Gretchen. It didn’t mean anything. 

But it pricks at a vulnerable place in her heart. Her crush back in Cayuga had seemed hopeless but warm and sweet, and she was content to have as much of Everett’s attention as he would give her and not ask for more. She never thought he would look at her like that, and she was just glad he was so friendly and willing to talk to her. 

She’s clear-eyed enough to know that she’d never be wearing Everett’s ring if what happened hadn’t happened. This is a gift of circumstance, but she thinks about the way he holds her when she wakes up weeping from dreams of lights in the sky and a man asking too many questions, and she doesn’t ask for more. 

\---

Everett finally gets a job as a DJ at the new local jazz station, 11pm to 5 am. They splurge on champagne and oysters and end up sick as dogs, but it’s a good memory, dancing around the tiny open scrap of kitchen linoleum while Everett sings Buddy Holly and she giggles. 

The next day, both queasy as she makes pancakes and he gulps down cups of coffee, she says, softly, not raising her eyes from the griddle, “How do you feel? About working nights?”

He is uncharacteristically silent; then, out of the corner of her eye, she sees his shoulder jerk in a shrug. “They sent us back. They obviously didn’t want us.”

She doesn’t say, _But what if they change their minds?_ She still isn’t sure whether she longs for that or dreads it. 

( _Maddy_.)

\---

She takes as many night classes as she can, but their schedules don’t quite match up--there’s always that one required class that’s at 8:00 in the morning. In the morning before she puts on her glasses, he pokes her under her eyes and makes fun of the dark circles there. At night, she sits at the kitchen table, surrounded by Everett’s ham radio equipment, and studies while his voice drifts out of the radio, her favorite sound in the world. 

\---

On the weekends, they wander around town and Fay tries not to gape like a tourist hick. Everett discovers some weird bookstore that she thinks his parents would not approve of and they head home with his arms full of books by authors she’s never heard of--Baldwin and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Fay tries some of them, but they aren’t really her kind of books. She’s never been one for poetry or novels--she always preferred nonfiction or sometimes science fiction (though she’s lost her taste for the latter). She doesn’t mind listening to Everett talk about them, though. She likes the way his eyes light up. 

He starts to bring friends home, now and then, one with a wild poof of curls and a turtleneck sweater, the other an Ohlone man with an easy smile. They’re always very nice to Fay, and she likes them, but she doesn’t like when they visit because afterwards the stink of that stuff they smoke clings to the living room couch for days.

“It makes everything slow down for a little while,” Everett says. “Everything matters so much less.”

She can see the appeal of that, so she doesn’t nag him about it. The one time she tries it herself, she coughs and sputters and hates it, but she loves the way Everett laughs at her.

\---

Even though Everett tells her to focus on school, Fay doesn’t know how to not have a job--she’d started babysitting when she was nine years old--so she works in the campus bookstore and saves up her money. It’s there that she first hears about the Poetry Center, and though she doesn’t have time to go to the Reading Series, one night after she gets out of the lab she hurries over and manages to catch James Wright right as he’s leaving. 

The look on Everett’s face as she hands him the signed copy of _The Branch Will Not Break_ is enough to make her want to dance around the room the way she used to when her favorite songs would come on the radio or there was a new issue of _Modern Mechanix_. He touches it gently, like it’s precious, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment. 

Then: “Hey,” he says, “hey, Fay,” his voice doing something she’s never heard it do before, something that sends a shiver of cold down her spine. The cold is sharp as a burn, in a good way. When he kisses her, she feels it down to her toes, the ends of her hair, the tips of her eyelashes. Lit up with light.

Neither of them really has any idea what they’re doing, but it’s so good to be close. She remembers when they first came back and she just wanted to disappear inside of Everett. This comes close to that, and when his skin is against hers, her mind that never stills becomes a warm and hazy place, a place she doesn’t want to escape from.

\---

“I hated your radio voice, you know.”

He snorts, pinches the soft skin just above her hip. Not a harsh pinch--just an “I’m here” pinch. “I believe you mentioned it a time or two, Miss Cayuga Queen. Sometimes at inopportune moments.”

She almost laughs at that, remembering, but she’s too worn out in a new, pleasant way. “I didn’t know why then. Or, you know I think I did, but I didn’t want to admit it.”

“How’s that, then?”

“When you just talked like you, you were just another boy at school.” Well, with the allure that an older boy always had, anyway. He’d only been one year ahead of her, but in high school, that mattered. “But when you did your radio voice, you sounded...grown up. You didn’t sound like you belonged in Cayuga at all. I knew you’d get away from there. And I was so scared I wouldn’t.”

He makes a low little sound in his throat. He doesn’t talk so much, afterwards. Unlike the rest of the time, when he never shuts up, after sex he’s lazy even with his words. He curls a lock of her hair around his finger and she’d shiver if she weren’t so totally content. “And now?”

“Now, all I hear is how much you love it.”

\---

It isn’t until the second semester of her sophomore year that she makes friends of her own. Amoli is from New Delhi and sticks out on campus; she’s fiercely creative in her approach to science and talking to her makes Fay feel the way reading a copy of _Science Digest_ used to make her feel back in Cayuga. Marvin is short and overeager, but he’s also funny in a way that is never unkind. Lenny is effeminate in a way that confused her but that she’s learning to recognize, and probably the smartest person she’s ever met. None of the other students in the department will pay attention to any of them, and once Fay takes the first step, it’s so easy to become their friends, so easy it amazes her. But then, they didn’t know her before. They don’t know anything about what happened to her. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy. Either way, she’s grateful. 

There are just so many more _kinds_ of people in California than there were in Cayuga. She had thought she had a grip on the range of human possibilities, but she learns quickly that she didn’t know anything at all about the things people can be. 

\---

Sometimes, still, Everett paces frantically around their small space, and when she tries to touch him, he shakes her off and disappears out the back door, the screen door slamming behind him. She doesn’t know for sure where he goes, but she thinks he walks for hours, and she spends the whole time praying that he’ll come back. 

\---

Everett’s still working nights, so he’s asleep when the news hits. Fay shakes him out of sleep and he pads barefoot out to the kitchen to listen to the radio. They still can’t afford a television, so later they won’t have the memories of the grainy film, the convertible and the first lady in her pink suit. What Fay remembers when she’s asked, “Where were you when JFK was assassinated?” is the way the radio voice of the announcer just collapsed like a dynamited building, leaving only the sound of a scared, grieving man. 

Maybe it’s that same grief that makes Everett ask it, the question neither of them have ever asked out loud. “Do you think Mrs. Blanche was right? That they’re making us do these things? Sitting up there with radio waves, beaming them down to play with people’s minds and steal our free will?”

“No,” Fay says, after a while. “It would be easier, wouldn’t it?” and he grunts in agreement. “But no. She was right that they’re up there, but I don’t think they’re making us do anything at all. I think people are just people.”

For once, he doesn’t argue with her in that teasing way he has of pushing back against anything she says even when she knows he agrees with her. They sit there, listening to the radio announcer’s voice choked and hopeless.

\---

She wasn’t sure what he’d say to her when she tells him, had run over a thousand scenarios in her mind. She’d decided the best way to do it was to outline comprehensively all the reasons it has to be this way, but when the moment comes, her hands are clasped so tight that her knuckles ache, and she just says she’s sorry, over and over, and tries to explain why she can’t, she _can’t_. 

But he just takes her hands and cuts off her pathetic babble. “Fay. I get it. I get it. No sweat, chickadee. You have to finish school. I’ll figure it out.”

And he does. She doesn’t know who he asks or how much he pays, but he finds the doctor and he borrows someone’s car to take her there. In the dingy little waiting room, she starts to cry again, and he sets his jaw in that fierce, protective way that makes her heart tighten and his voice is intense when he holds her to him and says, “You don’t ever have to apologize, Fay.”

But on the way home, groggy and plagued by a pain still surprisingly sharp, she lays on the back seat under the blanket from their bed and whispers, “I’m sorry,” again.

He catches her eye in the rearview mirror. “Hey. What did I tell you? Golly Moses, Fay, did you think I didn’t mean it? I understand. This isn’t the right time.”

And then the tears come again, because it’s worse than that. She’s so, so scared to tell him, but he’s never anything less than honest with her, so she makes herself. Maybe the loopiness of the medication helps. “I’m not sure I ever want to--” She swallows, tries again. “I don’t want children, Everett. Not ever. I don’t think I could stand it if…”

He’s quiet for a long time, and she wonders if she’s ruined it, this one good thing that’s somehow come out of everything. The pain of that is so much sharper than any she’s felt today. “No. No, of course. Of course you don’t. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

He always says that, with that fierce look, and he always does. A couple of weeks later, after she’s back on her feet and even going to classes again, he comes home one night and tells her what he did.

Maybe most men would have patted their wives on the head and said, “Oh, you’ll feel differently in a few years,” or even, “You are my wife. You owe me this.” Maybe another man would have said, “It’s not going to happen to our baby,” and told her the odds were astronomical or that they’d figure out a way to protect any children they had. But maybe Everett thinks of that sad, sad woman in that dark room, whispering nonsense words to herself. Or maybe he thinks of his mother-in-law, her head in the oven. 

“The doctor did _not_ want to do it, the stubborn bastard. Said I was too young to make a decision like that. I wanted to tell him, ‘Cool it, Clyde, I’m a thousand years old,’ but you can't say something like that to a square like that without risking getting locked up in the loony bin, you know? I had to make up some bull about how my wife was delicate or sick or some nonsense and would die if she got pregnant again. But anyway, it’s taken care of. You don’t have to worry anymore.”

She feels split open with love, that he would do that for her, and she throws herself into his arms and wonders when she started feeling safe. 

\---

The Maverick starts to make a buzz around town in the younger, hipper circles, and his boss gives him a raise. It’s no surprise to Fay that Everett starts to be known for his edgy taste in music and his cool style. He smiles more now, teases her more, and when they fight he doesn’t spit out, “Goddamn it, Fay,” as he slams his way out of the house. Instead he stays and unleashes his tongue on her, and she has to work so hard to keep up, but it’s a good clean argument instead of the festering, simmering pain they’ve both known too much of. 

\---

She graduates, not at the very top of her class, but close. Magna cum laude, anyway. The girls in her department see Everett for the first time at the graduation ceremony, and she sees the way their eyes go big and knows they never really believed her about her husband the DJ. Amoli hugs her so hard her feet leave the ground, Marvin makes Everett laugh, Lenny tells her mazel tov and kisses the top of her head. They get Chinese food and eat in Golden Gate Park and it’s such a good day that she doesn’t want it to end even when the sun goes down. 

So it doesn’t. They don't go home. In the park, there are far fewer lights, and when she looks up, the stars are clearer than she’s seen them in years. She takes a long, shuddering breath, and Everett’s hand tightens around hers.

“You doing okay, 500-Watt Fay?” 

“Yeah,” she says, making herself look at that sky. It’s empty. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> I dated the film to '58 because it's definitely post-Sputnik. My apologies to Donald Keyhoe, who did write a great many “flying saucer” books, but did not write the one I have attributed to him. James Wright didn't do a session at the San Francisco State University Poetry Center until 1965, but I'm tweaking the timeline a little bit. I’m also unsure of what it would involve for a guy in his early 20s to get a vasectomy in mid-century California (though the procedure was being performed), but I hope you can just go with it. Thanks to [mollivanders](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders) for SFBA expertise.


End file.
